Two cousins

We’re barely two months into the new year and our house has taken on the air of a Holiday Inn, it seems. For we’ve had two cousins from afar, and from different branches of my family, spend a few days with us.
First was a cousin from my mother’s side of the family, usually a resident of Switzerland (although he’s of English origin) and his equally English-origin Swiss wife. Although they’ve been frequent visitors to South Africa ~ this was their fifth trip ~ they’ve never visited Gauteng, so we gave them a bit of a tourist drive around the province, including a scenic drive around the hills of Pretoria and, in Johannesburg, a visit to the Constitutional Court.
On departure they professed themselves very pleased with their visit which they found enjoyable and educational, and even though I say so myself, I think I made a damn fine tour guide around Pretoria, filling their heads not only with the usual facts one would get from a professional guide, but with personal anecdotes based on my memories of growing up in the town.
Did you know, for example, that present-day Salvokop, today the site of Freedom Park, was previously named Timeball Hill? Why? Because in Pretoria’s earliest days it was the site of a timeball, a large copper ball mounted up a tall pole, which was raised, or lowered, by the nascent city’s officials to alert residents to the fact that the mail coach from Kimberley and Johannesburg had arrived.
More importantly, perhaps, geologists looking over the stones and rocks that make up the city’s foundations came across a type of rock formation on Timeball Hill that nobody had ever seen before, and they named it Timeball chert.
As they probed westwards along the Magaliesberg mountains the geologists found numerous other outcrops of Timeball chert and, in fact, it has been found worldwide in similar ancient rock formations. A little something that Pretoria gave to the world.
The evenings we spent at home, catching up on family news which, considering we hadn’t seen each other for 50 years, was quite a lot to catch up on. From schoolboys ~ he at Eton and me in Pretoria ~ to now both being of retirement age, it turns out that he and I are the black sheep of our rather snooty family. He because he totally rebelled against the family’s Conservative, upper-class “huntin’, shootin’, fishin’” ethos and spent a considerable number of his young adult years partaking of illegal substances and living the life of a bohemian, and I because as an African was never going to fit in to the British Establishment.
One of the snippets of family history he imparted was something so secret and dark and revolting it can never be discussed. And here I was thinking they were all so squeaky-clean.
More recently, we had a cousin from my father’s side of the family to stay. Now a resident of London, she and I are close in age, and spent much more time together as kids, both having grown up in Pretoria. Thus, tourist tours of Pretoria and Johannesburg with her are unnecessary and we were able to spend more time “skindering” about our other cousins and reminiscing about various family events, Grandmother’s Cornish pasties and Lancashire hotpot, and our Auntie Meg’s famed potato salad (though we both now disagree on what the special ingredient was that made it the most delicious potato salad in the world).
With all of this familial fraternising one would be forgiven for thinking that I am close to my extended family, both maternal and paternal. You’d be wrong. I’m far from close to my maternal family, mainly because they all live in Europe and rarely, if ever, visit South Africa and I, nowadays, rarely visit Europe. And I’m not particularly close to my paternal family either, despite the fact that many of the cousins still live in and around Gauteng. Get-togethers tend, nowadays, to be over the consolatory cup of tea in the church hall after somebody’s funeral.
So to have two visits within two months from cousins from both sides of my family, and both of them pleasant affairs with lots of jollity and laughter, has been a treat.
And without being melodramatic about it I find it sad that we’ve all drifted apart over the years. For, despite the fact that we are all very different, and all have very different world views (both cousins, residents of Europe, have a diametrically different view of Brexit to me, for example), we all share common bonds and, in so many ways, common histories.
And we have much to share with each other, even this late in life, and even if it involves deep, dark secrets that should never be discussed in public.